"The earliest picture of a figure in the street happened by pure chance. The man (who can be seen with one﻿ leg raised) stopped to have his boots shined. He was still long enough for an image to be formed. No one else is visible in the picture because they were in motion. Nevertheless there are pictures from the mid 1800s of people smiling e.g. Roger Fenton's Crimean War pictures.

Speaking of time travel through photography, my favorite photographs are the early and mid 1930’s German color photographs of the rise of Hitler before WWII. Many were taken on excellent film, far superior to anykthing we had at the time, and they show almost exactly what things looked like then, making them almost vividly current. Nothing works quite as well as color for that.

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